Review: A Streetcar Named Desire @ The Guthrie Theater

It is unfortunate that the only image of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire to endure in popular culture is that of a young Marlon Brando screaming “Stella!” at the top of his lungs. It’s unfortunate because, out of context, one might get the impression that the character Brando is playing , Stanley Kowalski, is heartbroken over something Stella has done—when in fact it is Stanley who, in a drunken rage, has just hit his pregnant wife, ransacked their apartment, and generally behaved like the abusive moron he is otherwise proud to be.

It’s also unfortunate because the play isn’t really about Stanley; it’s about Blanche DuBois, his wife Stella’s sister, a Southern belle who arrives in the first scene to Stanley and Stella’s working-class neighborhood and immediately begins antagonizing Stanley over his low-class roots, Polish ancestry, brutish behavior, and utter lack of cultural refinement. And if there were any justice in the way greatness is seared into the collective memory of popular culture, Gretchen Egolf’s portrayal of Blanche in the Guthrie’s current production would go down as one of the most brilliant performances in this play’s long and storied history.

There is no such justice, of course. Predictably, most of the advance press on the Guthrie’s current production focused on the famous actor who is taking on the Brando-branded role of Stanley Kowalski: Ricardo Antonio Chavira, who plays Carlos on TV’s Desperate Housewives. In the Guthrie’s production, however, it doesn’t take long for Egolf to establish herself as the star of the show.

Egolf is a TV/Broadway veteran who is making her Guthrie debut in Streetcar. Blanche is the belle of her own imaginary ball, a walking stereotype of southern refinement who also happens to be a lush, a liar, and a complete nervous wreck. The genius in Egolf’s performance is that she is able to simultaneously convey both sides of Blanche’s nature—the cotillion-raised society girl and the desperate neurosthene; the delicate flower of privilege and the scrappy survivor she has become.

On the surface, Egolf’s Blanche is an annoying caricature of southern gentility, but seething just beneath her sing-songy Southern accent and delicate, bird-like gestures is a cunning, calculating intelligence. Underneath it tall, Blanche is a shrewd woman who has accurately sized up Stanley as an abusive brute, and while much of her banter is harmless nonsense, she does give her sister Stella (played by Stacia Rice) sound advice with regard to Stella’s abusive and sexually charged marriage to Stanley. Blanche is rightfully appalled when Stella goes back to Stanley after he has hit her, and in many other ways she is the guiding conscience of the play, the one who—despite her pretentiousness, flightiness, and gift for deception—is the character who has the most accurate moral compass. (Which makes the ending all the more devastating.)

Egolf’s brilliance as Blanche doesn’t detract from Chavira’s portrayal of Stanley, however—it simply enhances Chavira’s brutishness. Chavira’s Stanley is a heavy-drinking, poker-playing man’s man, one whose muscles are tight with rage and whose anger is always simmering just beneath the surface, ready to boil over and combust at any moment. Stanley is suspicious of Blanche’s motives from the start, and the hatred between Stanley and Blanche gives the play its essential tension. Stacia Rice’s Stella is the calm eye in the middle of their increasingly furious storm, and the three of them create quite a tumultuous triangle.

Kudos must go to John-Miller Stephany’s direction as well. Desire—the constant yearning for it, and the consequences of succumbing to it—is one of the play’s central themes, and Stephany uses several nifty flourishes to suggest its broader implications in society at large. Between scenes in the Kowalski’s apartment, the street scene outside is busy and raucous, with street vendors hawking their wares and sailors and prostitutes going to and fro, striking bargains and disappearing into the shadows. In the beginning of the play, a couple walks by arm in arm—but he is white and she is black—and several sailors, apparent buddies, stroll innocuously by. Later in the play, though they only appear for a few seconds, the white man and the black woman walk by each other in opposite directions, having clearly broken up, and the friendly sailors on second thought appear to be a bit too friendly—suggesting that people’s carnal desires are often the cause of their own suffering, and that conventional morality does little to help the situation.

Aside from the flourishes mentioned above, the Guthrie’s production has the sense to trust the strength of the play and not layer it with gratuitous extras. The show is three hours long, but Egolf is a spellbinding presence in almost every scene, and the rest of the production seethes with the seedy energy of 1940s New Orleans, so the time flies by quickly. This Streetcar is one of those more-or-less definitive productions that people will remember for some time to come, because doing it any better would be extremely difficult. See it now, while the fire between Chavira, Egolf, and Rice is still hot.